What happens on the Internet stays on the Internet, right?

It’s been quite some time since I first (and last) built a website.

The first public website I built was one for my handball team, back in 2003. My friend and I were interested in computers and promised our teammates to set up a website with some basic info, links, pictures and a guest book.

Nostalgia hit me the other day, so I went searching in the Wayback Machine. There it was in all its glory. Well, not exactly in all its glory:

I was pleased to see some of it survived the test of time. Sadly, the archived version didn’t contain any of the photos.

The website took weeks to put together, shifting between Photoshop, Dreamweaver and a hideous web interface belonging to our free web hosting company Spray.

One of our more tedious tasks was the creation of an image map that would serve as the main menu on the homepage. I don’t exactly remember what made it so hard. We spent ages mapping clickable areas through pixel coordinates, adjusting the image to get it just right, and having to do it all over again when realising we were a menu item short.

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<map name="Map">
<area shape="rect" coords="2,6,91,38" href="matcher.html" alt="matcher">
<area shape="rect" coords="2,71,91,103" href="/guestbook/?id=8872" alt="gästbok">
<area shape="rect" coords="137,117,226,149" href="laget.html" alt="laget">
<area shape="rect" coords="286,73,375,105" href="lanksidan.html" alt="länkar">
<area shape="rect" coords="286,6,375,38" href="kontakt.html" alt="kontakt">
<area shape="default" nohref>
</map>

What was the result of our efforts you ask? A measly six-page website, probably totalling a couple of hundred words all in all. At least we had the sense to resist the urge of flaming text from Cooltext.

It’s been nearly 18 years since the creation of that Frankensite, and now I’m at it again. A six-page website with a couple of hundred words, but I decided to skip image maps this time around.